Liberal women will rise up

Page Tools

Pro-choice Liberals are out there, and they will march
in the streets if necessary, writes Louise Staley.

I am a Christian, a long-time member of the Liberal Party
and I'm pro-choice, pro-stem cell research and I support the
legalisation of voluntary euthanasia. I'm also not alone.

Yet, to read the various opinion pieces in The Age and
elsewhere in recent days, I don't exist. Rachel Buchanan ("This is
ultrasound anguish", on this page last Tuesday) railed against
anti-choice Christians. On the same day Leslie Cannold provided a
long list of some of the more high-profile people opposed to
abortion. Surprise, surprise - they were all conservatives, and
eight of the 10 are Coalition MPs.

In this debate Liberal women have been castigated for not
speaking out in favour of choice, yet a number of women MPs have,
and the writers condemning the rest of us for our public silence
know nothing about the private conversations going on in the
Liberal Party.

Nobody should be under any delusion: if there are moves to
change the law, or to restrict Medicare funding, Liberal women will
be marching alongside their pro-choice sisters of other political
persuasions.

Ditto for Christian women. Yes, many fundamentalist Christians
are anti-choice. So are many Jews and Muslims. But those who lump
all Christians into one camp should consider just who fills the
pews in most churches: middle-aged and elderly women who lived
through the time when abortion was illegal. They remember and
they'll be there.

And we won't just be marching. Liberal women have a long and
proud history of policy activism; we have spent years running
campaigns on many issues. Through our internal party forums we also
have access to the MPs, and it is certain every MP will know what
most of his or her branch members think about this issue.

The pro-choice movement needs to embrace pro-choice Liberals in the effort to fend off this anti-abortion crusade.

The words many Liberals use differ from the "right to choose"
lexicon that dominates the present debate. We talk about privacy:
the privacy of the doctor-patient relationship. This fits with
current law in Victoria where the decision to terminate a pregnancy
is that of the woman and her doctor based on medical reasoning. The
meaning equates to "the right to choose" or "the right to control
our own bodies".

This difference in expression explains why many pro-choice
Liberal women have been silent. They see abortion as a private
matter, not a subject to be discussed. The last thing pro-choice
Liberals want is an unpleasant public battle, particularly as this
adds to the public platform of the anti-choice proponents. Hence we
make our feelings known privately - but no less effectively.

It's also true that there is a minority strand within the
Liberal Party who seek to tie "being a good Liberal" to their
conservative agendas and to categorise pro-choice Liberal women as
not belonging. This is somewhat ironic since we belong to the party
of choice: in education, in child raising, in union membership.

In the stem cell debate, 75 per cent of Victorian federal
Liberal MPs supported the legislation and many of them are
church-going Christians. They stood up when it counted on stem
cells, and there is no reason to assume they will go missing if
abortion is debated in the Federal Parliament.

It is unproductive for other pro-choice writers to either berate
pro-choice Liberals and Christians for their silence, or to assume
silence means people are anti-choice. Were a journalist to actually
ask every federal MP whether they supported restricting Medicare
funding of abortion, or changes to Northern Territory and ACT law,
it would become clear that the anti-choice lobby does not have the
numbers.

Yes, there are some anti-choice activists in the Liberal Party
(just as there are in the Labor Party), and we've seen some of the
more high-profile members of that group out and about putting their
views. But they are a minority in the Parliament, just as those who
want to see the abortion law changed are a minority in society.
There's no point in trying to argue with them; all the pro-choice
arguments in the world will not change their views.

Instead, pro-choice advocates should push the Labor state
governments to enact modern law that properly reflects present
practice. It is anachronistic that Victoria relies on the
Menhennitt ruling and NSW on the Levine and Kirby judgements to
override the criminal code. I am uncomfortable that judges should
get to determine whether abortion is legal.

It is curious that Liberal women are being asked to speak out
but nobody is asking Labor women to use their influence to have
state legislation enacted to protect choice.

The broad pro-choice movement needs to embrace pro-choice
Liberals and Christians in their campaigns to fend off this latest
anti-abortion crusade.

The message coming from groups such as the Women's Electoral
Lobby and a variety of commentators is that we're not relevant. But
to divide the pro-choice majority is exactly what the anti-choice
activists want. We must not let that happen.

Louise Staley is a former Victorian vice-president of the
Liberal Party.